I recall a hurricane in western Maine, the memory of which has stayed with me for years because I was taking still photographs of a windy scene. I was a reporter, and I was to cover the hurricane for our weekly newspaper.

Imagine what blowing branches, whipping about in a powerful wind, look like in the photo. Branches in strange positions. No wind.

Thankfully, no major damage occurred, so there were no awful photos to take. I just recall making the wind pause in the photos I did take.

Another hurricane I'll also never forget happened in Pennsylvania when I was a kid, and it happened a few days before we came to Maine by train for vacation.

The story really began late the spring before that August storm. Insects -- I forget which kind, perhaps 17-year locusts -- devastated the woods, ate all the leaves off all the trees. It seemed like all the leaves and all the trees.

We all felt terrible for those poor trees. None of us felt terrible for the insects.

We thought the trees would die. Maybe they would, had the summer been longer and hotter and dryer.

But it turned out that those bugs saved the trees.

Then the storm came, a hurricane. I'd never seen a hurricane in suburban Philadelphia. I did this time. It tore through our little town with ferocious winds. I don't recall what my family did as the storm raged, but afterwards we began to explore. Our yard wasn't in bad shape except for a few branches down. Our house stood tough through the hurricane.

As a kid, I walked a lot in a woods near our house, primarily to see what glimpses I could see of wildlife. I walked through the woods after that terrible storm.

The trees were mostly fine, standing tall and straight but without their leaves, since the insects had eaten them all.

We realized that nature had saved the trees via the insects. Nature is not stupid, I learned, just not always to be understood at a given time.

A very shot time later, a day or so, we boarded the train for our vacation in Maine. Generally we rode a Pullman, but this was a day trip. I'll never forget it.

The tracks had been damaged by flooding, so we waited here and there for repairs to be completed. At one place where we sat and waited, the rail bed was on an embankment, and I could see buildings nearby with water up to just below the top of the first floor. That trip took all day.

Another hurricane or just a heavy windstorm struck western Maine after I had lived there for a number of years. This storm brought many trees down, and basically closed parts of the Appalachian Trail until volunteers could reopen it. Some of the trees remained across the trail for a few years.

At the time, I was caring for a trail system in a woods near my home, South Paris. When I walked through it to inspect the damage, I saw one place where large -- a foot or more in diameter -- trees were lain crisscross across one another on the trail. There was no way my humble bow saw could clear the trail here.

A teacher at Oxford Hills High School's building trades and other similar skills facility, brought his team of students into the trail system. They totally cleared up that tangle of blowdowns.

At times I'm a bit skeptical of education systems, but this one had my complete admiration.

Two other storms I remember well. One was a tornado in Pennsylvania, and I was being kept after school for not doing something I should have done or doing something I shouldn't have. I leaned on the window sill, awaiting the passing of my sentence. Suddenly, several of us were glued to that window. A mile or so away, we saw the funnel cloud of a tornado passing. That was so interesting, it made me wonder how hard it was to actually punish school kids for what they didn't or did do.

Education can be a wonderful thing.

The other tornado was in southern New Hampshire. We had spent the day at Hampton Beach and were just starting across the road that formed a causeway back to I95. I looked up and saw this dark, dark cloud coming. Guessing it was a tornado, I stopped alongside an old wooden building that may have been two or three stories tall.

And waited. The car shook a bit, but otherwise nothing happened to us.

Sometimes the ignorant and novices in life's crisis win out for some reason other than their own wit.

As I write this, Hurricane Irene is raging up the Eastern Seaboard, due soon to strike Rhode Island. By the time Irene reaches us, the rocky coast and inland mountains should have banged out a lot of her bluster so she will no longer be a hurricane.

The actual storm track I saw in a newspaper and online today, showed the track to be along the Maine-New Hampshire border, a few miles west of South Paris, where a daughter and her husband live. According to the map, we should be on the very fringe of the 250-mile wide storm. Crossing our fingers, which is hard while you're typing, we hope to ride our relatively mild part of the storm out with no real problems.

We called my daughter and her husband today. They live a in South Paris a bit out in the woods and don't get TV news or online. So they hadn't heard much about the coming storm -- except that it's coming.

I did tell them that should they have to leave home because of storm damage, they are welcome at our little home in our woods even though it's 150 miles east of them.

I had planned to tell them about the storm track on the maps I saw and how it came very close to South Paris. I wanted to tell them that the line jiggled a bit to the east to be sure and swing by and visit them. It didn't actually on the map, and I didn't tell them that.

When a major storm is headed your way or toward your daughter and her husband's house, it's not the time to harvest corn.

Hurricanes are not really funny.

Just that one where I tried to capture the waving branches with a still camera.

Milt Gross can be reached for corrections, harassment, or other purposes at lesstraveledway@midmaine.com.

Milton M. Gross Copyright 2011